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In the most extreme cases, the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a crime against humanity. Atrocities committed against heritage during armed conflicts carry direct links with ethnic and cultural cleansing, and the denial of fundamental human rights: the scrubbing away of the history, memory, and identity of entire peoples. Accordingly, in the event of armed conflict, cultural heritage enjoys protection under International Humanitarian Law. Yet, in practice, the track-record of international efforts to protect heritage from targeted attacks is far from unblemished.

Global Standards for Heritage Protection in War and its Aftermath: Institutional Controversies and Contested Universality (GHOSTS) examines the underlying institutional controversies in the United Nation’s argumentation surrounding the formulation and implementation of global standards for heritage protection in conflict and post-conflict scenarios. It reconceptualises the UN’s construction of a global responsibility to protect heritage as a process through which the cultural foundations of international society can be strengthened. It analyses the UN’s heritage protection agenda through two case studies, which problematise the universality of the UN’s top-down vision of heritage as a source of peace and reconciliation: the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars (1991-2001) and the conflict in Mali (2012-). The project starts from two empirical objectives: 1) to examine the institutional dynamics, mechanisms of influence, and principles-based agendas underpinning the construction of heritage protection as a global responsibility; and 2) to analyse the ways in which the inclusion of heritage protection into peacekeeping missions and peacebuilding efforts is argued for in the Yugoslavia and Mali cases.

The impacts of the project are three-fold: 1) problematising the links between heritage and warfare in advancing the UN’s world order of peace; 2) re-evaluating the significance of heritage protection in international cultural politics; and 3) pointing attention to heritage protection as one factor in a multidimensional perspective on sustainable peace and stability.